My Name: Matthew Sanborn Smith. My challenge: Write 1000 stories by the time I'm 50 years old. Current story count: 160. Current age: 48. (Yes, I know it will never happen. I push on regardless.)
The One-Thousand is made up of stories that are aimed at publication in professional venues.
I've been published at Tor.com, Nature, and Chizine, among others. Listen to me on the occasional StarShipSofa and every single Beware the Hairy Mango. Shoot me an e-mail at upwithgravity@gmail.com

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Today's my 38th birthday. Yay me. When I was a teenager we had a running joke and I have no idea how it came about. We used to joke that I was going to die when I was 38 years old. Cause of death: Hit by a bus. Not that anything else I predicted ever came true, but I've got one of those gnawing feelings. I don't believe that I can see the future or anything. What I do believe is that the more evil parts of my mind may work to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I may be standing on a sidewalk, unsuspecting, when a bus turns onto the street I'm on and my id grabs control of my skull for the second that it would take, and say, "Fuck it, let's show 'em I was right," and I throw myself in front of the bus. The end. For this reason, I'll be trying extra hard to avoid buses over the next twelve months. Most people might not reach the age of 39 with a sense of relief. I certainly will.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

One of the great things about being an adult is that you can eat ice cream with chocolate syrup for breakfast. Another great thing about being an adult is that you can deny your children the same privilege and then rub it in by eating your ice cream with chocolate syrup right in front of them, all the while telling them how good it tastes (even if it doesn't (but it always does)).

One of the great things about taunting your children in this way is that, to them, you're acting in a perfectly understandable manner. They would do the exact same thing in your position. They might get angry or cry, but it would never occur them to call you immature (unlike your no-fun grump of a wife who is so no-fun that she never eats ice cream with chocolate syrup for breakfast, even though she could (and, let's be honest, has been able to for quite a number of years)), because there is no mature or immature to them, there is only being. There is, however, not eating ice cream with chocolate syrup for breakfast and definitely eating ice cream with chocolate syrup for breakfast and that second one is you, so even if no-fun grumpy-skirt happens to be around, you win.